On Affirmative Action

Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices. The question is not when does it end, but when does it begin … When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?

What’s Holder getting at? On a couple of minor notes, he apparently views benefits as entitlements, rather than things to be earned, at least insofar as “people of color” are concerned. Moreover, he’s simply ignorant of recent history. Affirmative action only developed in the 1970s—some 100+ years after emancipation, segregation, and the development of his party’s Jim Crow laws.

He considers that affirmative action must never end—it’s always to be kept in play. Yet there’s that stigma of affirmative action, whether or not justified: did the individual get the position because he was the best qualified, or because he best filled a political square? This is fair to “people of color,” how, exactly? Or to “people of no color?”

He exposes a breathtaking blindness to the segregation that is affirmative action. Groups always will be segregated—and so always actively barred from joining the mainstream—as long as they’re singled out for special treatment, such as affirmative action inflicts.